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subprime

On Tuesday, during Amazon’s Prime Day, festivities, the online retailer’s credit card partner Visa joined in the fun with a promotion where customers who made a $150 purchase using their Amazon-branded Visa card would receive a $30 discount. That’s an appealing bargain, and plenty of customers prepared to take advantage of it. What they didn’t do was read the fine print, or take it seriously, and a lot of customers missed out. [More]

Prime Day is a shopping holiday, so actually being able to shop should be an important part of that. Or not. Users are reporting problems actually checking out when they try to make purchases on Amazon, which would sort of defeat the whole point of having a shopping-themed holiday. [More]

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, companies – and lenders – are allowed to access credit reports only for “permissible purposes,” like determining if a person is creditworthy. But federal regulators say a Florida-based subprime credit reporting company illegally obtained tens of thousands of consumers’ credit reports for use in marketing materials for potential clients, including payday lenders.

In the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s second action against unscrupulous credit card companies this week, it has ordered a subprime credit card issuer to refund $2.7 million to customers for illegally charging costly fees. [More]

Tomorrow, President Obama is expected to call for the creation of a new watchdog agency that would help protect consumers from abusive credit card, mortgage, banking practices. The banking industry is not happy about the idea, reports CNN. But hey, they’re just looking out for us: “It’s bad for consumers,” a banking industry lobbyist told the network. Oh, well, never mind then, and pass me some more delicious subprime!

Here’s the official court filing (PDF) so you can get the full details on how Wells Fargo pushed or even fraudulently placed black borrowers into sub-prime loans, even when those borrowers could afford prime loans, along with an office environment where employees threw around racist slurs, calling black borrowers “mud people” and their mortgages “ghetto loans.” The official statements referenced in the NYT article are in this document in full. The affidavits begin on page 48. Two screenshots inside…

Last week I was watching Lou Dobbs while scrubbing my dentures and complaining about joint pain (two of those things are true, sadly), and I saw a segment on Ohio congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, who is encouraging homeowners to stay put in their foreclosed houses. She argues that many of the loans made during the subprime fiasco may not be legit, and that you should seek legal counseling and demand a mortgage audit from the bank before leaving. Kaptur admits her advice doesn’t trump the sheriff knocking at your door with an eviction notice, but a real estate lawyer told the Toledo Blade that otherwise she has a point.

We think the idea of “Credit Crunch,” a print-it-yourself board game in this week’s issue of The Economist, is great. We’re not convinced it’s exactly cost-effective to print the board, cards, and money with your own equipment, though—as someone suggests in their comments section, maybe a web-savvy reader should create an online version.

The number of people filing for bankruptcy continues to increase, as bad mortgages and the rising price of [insert noun here] squeezes every last penny out of debt-laden consumers. The American Bankruptcy Institute says the number of filings was up 47.7% in April from a year ago, and up 7.1% from March ’08.

For about $1400, you can raise your FICO credit score by 35 to 40 points through companies like TradeLine Solutions, writes the New York Times. Lots of subprime mortgage holders are turning to these companies in a last ditch effort to game the FICO system, in order to avoid rate adjustments that might send them into foreclosure. Of course, knowingly misrepresenting your credit score might count as loan fraud, points out a FICO representative.

Although December marked a slight decrease in Chapter 13 filings from November, 2007 overall logged a whopping 40% rise in the number of bankruptcy filings compared to 2006, reports the Wall Street Journal—over 800,000 filings in 2007, versus around 570,000 the previous year.